Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday July 13, 2014 @07:24AM
from the philosophy-majors-in-philly,-music-majors-in-singapore dept.

The wage gap between college-educated workers and those with just a high school diploma has been growing — and accelerating. But the education gap is also doing something unexpected: clustering workers with more education in cities with similar people. "This effectively means that college graduates in America aren't simply gaining access to higher wages. They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air." Most people are aware of the gentrification strife occurring in San Francisco, but it's one among many cities experiencing this. "[Research] also found that as cities increased their share of college graduates between 1980 and 2000, they also increased their bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, museums and art galleries per capita. And they experienced larger decreases in pollution and property crime, suggesting that cities that attract college grads benefit from both the kind of amenities that consumers pay for and those that are more intangible." The research shows a clear trend of the desirable cities becoming even more desirable, to the point where it's almost a necessity for city planners to lure college graduates or face decline.

"We want to be as wealthy and well-positioned as people who worked their asses off in their 20's even though we couldn't be bothered to educate ourselves after high school and spent our 20's living with our parents, partying, and having a sweet car that we could only afford because we lived with our parents."

Here's a thought: Teach your kids the concept of long-term goals... It worked wonders for me.

We want to be as wealthy and well-positioned as people who worked their asses off in their 20's even though we couldn't be bothered to educate ourselves

Who says that people who did not go to college did not educate themselves? You think that college is the only way to get an education? Anyone with the skills should be able to get the job, regardless of what piece of paper they have or don't have.

The self-taught "experts" may not be complete dumbfucks, but they never have as complete of a body of knowledge as somebody who has actually even just tried to get some sort of a formal education in their chosen field.

I'm talking about the guy who maybe never even finished high school, but he read a couple of Ruby on Rails books, hacked together a simple blog system that kinda worked, and now he considers himself a computer science expert.

I've worked with enough of these self-proclaimed self-taught "experts" to have noticed some trends. One of the most singificant is that they have massive holes in what they know. They may know the basics of using a given programming language, but then they'll have no idea about security, or algorithms, or writing code that performs well. They won't know about Big-O notation and its implications. They don't know anything about relational theory and have no idea about the ACID principles, so they use NoSQL DBs, write what would be simple SQL queries using complex JavaScript code instead, and create "databases" that corrupt or lose data left and right.

The guy with the bachelor's degree may not be an expert, but at least he'll have likely heard at least something beyond the basics. He at least knows that an O(n^4) algorithm isn't going to scale well. He at least knows how to use foreign key constraints when designing a DB.

Hell, even the guy who only managed a couple of years of college before dropping out is probably a better candidate than the self-taught "expert" with no college experience whatsoever.

As an industry, we don't need yet another high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book thinking he's anything more than a shitty high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book. We need less such people, in fact.

The self-taught "experts" may not be complete dumbfucks, but they never have as complete of a body of knowledge as somebody who has actually even just tried to get some sort of a formal education in their chosen field.

Most college graduates are money-seeking who don't understand anything, too.

I'm talking about the guy who maybe never even finished high school, but he read a couple of Ruby on Rails books, hacked together a simple blog system that kinda worked, and now he considers himself a computer science expert.

So in other words, you're comparing completely ignorant idiots to people who got some amount of formal education. Not a big surprise there. On the other hand, people who do self-education right...

I hope you're not using these people to deride all autodidacts. The self-taught "experts" you speak of are barely self-taught at all, so the comparison isn't really valid.

As an industry, we don't need yet another high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book thinking he's anything more than a shitty high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book. We need less such people, in fact.

What I want to know, why are people modding up such an opinionated piece of drivel from an anon coward? This so called debate is old and sad. People choose to learn what they think is important. Most employers seem to think getting the work done FAST and not blowing things up is important. I have worked for employers for 20 years now and taught myself what I needed to know. I also went to school and took calc, chem, physics, have read constantly for my whole life, whatever, it didn't have a damn thing to do with what I work on now or my approach to learning. That started from when I was young, not college. So this talk of making a big distinction between those who go to college/university and those who do not, is "uneducated" and a false start to any conversation.

thing with you but I've seen similar stuff with self taught "experts". Let's see, I've seen experts that didn't know what the real difference between a list and array were, let alone knew what a map was. (CS 102 stuff.) Would always try to reinvent the wheel whether it was writing their own quick sort instead of using the built in one or building their own formatting routines that make the same strings as the ones already available in the class they're using. Then there's the whole issue of doing object ori

A degree doesn't guarantee diddly - had a colleague, a hardware EE FIVE years out of school, who was unable over the course of a 4 month project to remember the difference between a BJT and a MOSFET, for between the two polarities thereof.

Most frustrating as the circuit in question used all 4 types, and every review had to start from square one or, at best two. FIVE years in industry.

Kind of like saying you can become an astronaut as a highschool drop out. Yes, technically you could have the skill and self educate, but who in their right mind would even consider such a person? Risk is way too high.

In theory, you don't need to go to college, but in practice, humans can't predict the future and people without degree are higher risk. Not worth it.

That makes me imagine , what if people like Steve Jobs were running after jobs with their resume? There is something fundamentally wrong in this whole thing . There is something fundamentally unstable . You are just being exploited by someone whi inturn is being exploited by someone else.. something is wrong..

Steve Jobs is an outlier. Even in the real world, quantum affects can make the impossible possible, but don't expect it to happen. There is a chance the electrostatic force in every atom in your body would suddenly stop working and you would fall into the Earth. There are magnitudes more failures than successes when it comes to people trying to carve out their own path in life. It can happen, it does happen, but if it's your goal to be like Steve Jobs, expect to fail.

Steve Jobs didn't run around with a resume because he went and started his own business. At the time, his talents were with something new, and wouldn't have been recognized by established companies anyway. If you think that your skills are something special, you serve yourself better by going and using them in an original way as an entrepreneur rather than trying to fit in the box of some established job. Of course, it is much easier to have someone else start a business and provide work for you to do, but

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what an analogy is. An analogy is not the same as saying that two things are exactly alike. It's saying that two things are similar in one or more ways. Understand that, and you'll soon stop replying as if someone said that two things are exactly alike even when it's perfectly apparent that they did not

Perhaps people who post "analogy fail" mean that the differences between two things outweigh the similarities so much as to invalidate reasoning from situations with the one to situations with the other.

In that case, allow me to try again: Perhaps it's a claim that the originally claimed similarities are not enough to support the point that the original analogy purported to demonstrate. For example, both paint and soft drinks come in cans, but that obviously wouldn't support the original argument "if it's canned, it ought to be drinkable".

Most four-year college kids aren't in technical program. They're in liberal arts programs. Typically they have lots of trouble getting up early enough to get to a 10 AM class, and bitch and moan that an 8-hour day is required to earn an A. They spend most of their time getting drunk and getting laid, and call it "networking." They spend a significant proportion of their study time debating fields that are (pretty much by definition) intellectual masturbation, like philosophy or theology. Then they go home and spend a few years on the couch waiting for the economy to improve, and/or frantically trying to get into grad school. They don't actually enter a field where the boss expects you to there at 8 AM every day until they hit their late 20s. And I know this because I went to a four-year-college for Histyory and Political Science, and then spent a year-and-a-half in Grad School; and ended up with absolutely no marketable skills.

OTOH, HS-educated kid tend to get thrown out at 18. Most of my co-workers at Home Depot had their own places, which they got with no help from Mom at all, at that age. The ones actually in their 20s generally have really shitty 10-year-old car, or no cars at all. The younger ones tend not to work a full 40 hours, because the company really prefers the scheduling flexibility four part-timers get you to two full-timers; and if you;re around a couple years you generally get full-time; but they are there at 6 AM when their schedule says "be there at 6 AM," and they stay until 10 PM on those days. Almost alkl of them have to do one of these a week, so they don;t have anything a middle-class person would call a "sleep schedule."

I'm confused, do you think that college is harder than working a manual labor job for 8-10 hours a day? Because it's not. It's much easier than pretty much any real job. Why else is college synonymous with drinking and partying? Unfortunately, many people can't afford to go to college because of exorbitant tuition prices. Not everyone has mommy and daddy that can pay it for them.

many people can't afford to go to college because of exorbitant tuition prices

Don't worry, it seems the more expensive a University is, the worse the quality of the education. Go find a nice tax supported state Uni. Mine had a 90% in-state discount and the other 10% was easily covered loans or one of the many state grants. TONS of state grants. If you ignore food and housing, college is virtually free for any family making making average income.

My observation is that people who don't go to college tend to get a job locally. People who do go to college often attend a college outside of the local area, and when they graduate, often apply for jobs nationwide.

The process of going to college makes moving to a new location much more natural.

It's no wonder that college grads will move to places where they can get good jobs, and that this would be places that already have a high concentration of people with college degrees.

On the flip side, if/when those college-educated people decide to have kids, they will find that having family nearby is a huge help. Roughly half of the college-educated parents in my generation (out of those I know well) moved to be near their parents specifically to make childcare easier. This often means a bit of career back-tracking, as they come up to speed in a different area of their field, or change to a significantly different industry.

Absolutely right. I grew up in an economically disadvantaged area, went to college, and settled in one of the best-performing metro areas in the country. My classmates who skipped college are still there, driving 1-2 hours each way to the closest job they can find, and enduring the double disadvantages of lacking a college degree and living in a depressed area.

When one is living dangerously close to the poverty line, moving away from friends and family will be perceived as unacceptable risky. Only the most ambitious will leave, and most of those people went to college anyway.

Also, the premise of this is a little silly to begin with. Wouldn't you need to analyze what percentage of people with college degrees CAME from cities vs. rural areas, and then compare the percentage that GO to cities vs. rural areas and determine whether there is a significant difference?

Except that immigrants to the US are a self-selecting group. Only the most motivated people are going to go through all the hassle and work that it takes to actually get here, so of course they are more likely to be successful once they do. There are also a lot of successful black people that grew up poor. But there are just a lot more black people overall, and as a group they didn't choose to be here in a country that is constantly shitting on them. As to your claim that there is no oppression any more, that is constantly disproved by studies that show having a "black" sounding name will result in fewer job interviews, less support from university faculty, harsher law enforcement treatment, etc. It is a reality that you cannot deny.

I saw a report on I think 60 minutes probably 10 or 15 years ago where the black community was up in arms because they were losing out on scholarships. The complaint was they were losing them to the children of recent immigrants from Africa, a group that hadn't gone through the history of slavery because their ancestors didn't live in the US. (The whole point as far as they were concerned was this was to give a leg up to people that as a class had suffered through slavery and racism and recent African immigrants were not in this group but qualified for the scholarships and took them away from the people they were intended for.) To add insult to injury the recent African immigrants tended to be fairly successful and that lead to the complaint they didn't need the help anyway. But like you wrote, these immigrants were a self selecting group who went through all that hassle and they were more likely to be successful in the end.(It looks to me as though any group that intentional migrates will tend to do well because they're the driven to find success while people that are forced to migrate probably won't.)

That's not totally true. Just look at blacks in the US. While they were primary located in the southeastern states at first, there were several waves of mass migration. That's how we ended up with major cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and Washington D.C. that have black majorities.

They moved to get away from the KKK and segregated bathrooms. Are you suggesting that solution is somehow applicable now? Start a KKK against people who didn't go to college so they will move?

... the college education included acquiring the desire to move to such places?

Personally, I don't consider places like NYC or SF to be desirable places to live. "Clean air"? "Low crime?" "Better schools?" Certainly, compared to other "cities of size". But, to me, the choice isn't limited to which "big city" to live in. And those criteria work to exclude larger cities, in my opinion.

I just did, at least for my state, and while there are of course some cities that do have higher crime rates than NYC (21) a VAST majority have lower, and in many cases far lower, crime rates than NYC (~580). Even sorting out all of the "small" cities (anything below 70,000) still shows only 5 cities with higher rates (One being Detroit) and 12 with lower rates. Of those 12 cities with lower rates 8 have half is violent crime rate (639.3). NYC may not be terrible crime wise, but its still not great eithe

Don't just look at "violent" crime rates. Look at property rates too. NYC is one of the lowest out there regardless of size. What source are you using? in 2012 per the UCR database, of agencies in populations > 100K NYC ranked # 97 in violent crime rate and #272 in property crime rates (both out of 287 reporting) For murders it is #131, Even robbery (as opposed to burglary) it is only ranked #74.

You could say the same thing about reports (or lack thereof) of rural crime of all times. I spend a large part of the year in a fairly remote rural area. We have no police department. The only option is the state police who can take up to 45 mins to respond after 8pm. End result is a lot of shit goes unreported, not just because it seems pointless to do so, but also beause of potential retribution.

If that's your cup of tea, and you've the good fortune to select a profession that pays the bills your entire life in your chosen metropolis, I say more power to you. Others may find solace in living more simple, rural lives.

Remember, much of the benefit of higher wages is just more money passing through your hands to accommodate the cities' higher cost of living.

It depends on what you mean by "cost of living." It is actually much easier to be poor in a city than in a rural area. Public transportation means that you don't have to own a car or pay for gas/insurance. You have much easier access to social services, food banks, etc. You can survive on a lot less money in the city than in more isolated areas. The problem comes when you start to want more space.

Public transportation means that you don't have to own a car or pay for gas/insurance.

Unless you get an ultimatum that if you don't come into work on one of the 58 days a year when buses don't run, you'll lose your job. In my city, this includes New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the first Sunday of the year, the second Sunday of the year,..., and the fifty-second Sunday of the year.

I have family in rural areas and they like to go on hikes in natural areas and a national park, camping and other outdoor activities rather than the cultural getting drunk at bars every weekend and spending all your money eating out at restaurants

Because people in urban centers spend most of their time going to libraries, zoos, museums & art centers? Most of those "bigots" from rural areas go out of their way and consider it a privilege to go to urban centers and experience those things. Many in those urban centers that could walk or drive to them in under 20 minutes rarely if ever go. I grew up in a rural area and my childhood was filled with trips to the Toledo Zoo, Washington DC, Cape Canaveral, various space & history centers, and my family was far from well off (farmer, UPS driver, McDonalds, Backhoe operator, Walmart is a rough employment history of my parents). I've seen people living out in the sticks with far more culture than some living a block from a major library/museum.

There is no culture in rural areas. There is no learning. For the active mind, it is a fate worse than death. Intelligent people want to be around other intelligent people. Who wants to live in the country with a bunch of bigots who dismiss any ideas they don't agree with?

You don't think the thing you just said then was maybe, well, super bigoted?

I grew up in the country, there are smart people too. The town's "intellectual elite" tend to know each other and be friendly regardless of their profession, age and views, meaning that if you're smart, you get a diverse group of friends. In cities, people form microcosms of folks just like them, with roughly the same job, the same age, the same personality and the same views. A metropolis is the antithesis of diversity, they bring

less crime? OK. clearner air? compared to....? NYC is a big place - its not just Manhattan or the upper East (or West) side. In fact, you might make the argument in reverse when it comes to NYC, that lower "skilled" workers are clustering there and getting the benefits described.

They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air.

There's more restaurants because there are more high-income college grads to spend money there. There's less street crime because Johnny the Finance Douchebag isn't likely to do anything worse than public urination. (white collar crime is another matter)

As for better schools, hasn't happened yet at least in NYC -- the system is very uneven and the lengths parents will go through to get their kid in a better elementary school are legendary. Lose the battle, and welcome to the suburbs. If it does happen, it'll again be because the well-educated wealthy college students are there.

The implied narrative that those rich overeducated scum are hogging all the good places and leaving the poor in high-crime areas with bad schools, dirty air, and no amenities gets cause and effect completely wrong.

Yes, lots of educated (and wealthy) citizens create markets for better services in cities. But decades of surveys of companies planning locations and of educated workers considering relocation tell us it works the other way around, too.

States like Arizona and Texas that base their plans for attracting high-wage (lots of educated employees) employers on cutting taxes usually do it by also slicing schools and other services.

That seems to be working in places like Austin, where the city makes up for the lack of State support for education (or actual hostility to it) by cranking up local sales taxes -- which fall more on the poor than on the affluent. Which is a sweet deal if you're making serious money as a twenty-something in technology there, but might not look so good when you have kids and you're looking for daycare and primary schools.

We're doing the experiment. Check in again in ten or twenty years to see which way the arrow of cauality runs.

Education is funded by property taxes, not sales tax. In Austin, people are being priced out of their homes because they voted for every social program out there, and now the taxes are too damn high.

"I'm at the breaking point," said Gretchin Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8500 this year.

"It's not because I don't like paying taxes," said Gardner, who attended both meetings [of "irate homeowners"]. "I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can't afford to live here anymore."
-- Austin American-Statesman

" In Austin, people are being priced out of their homes because they voted for every social program out there, and now the taxes are too damn high." -- commonly stated, but bullshit and contradicted by the facts. I own two houses in the Austin area -- one near downtown Austin which I rent out, and one in Williamson County near Cedar Park (suburban, bedroom community to Austin, the anti-Austin politically) where I live. When the two houses were at near identical values the total property taxes on the Williamson County house were HIGHER than the Austin house. The county taxes and and school district taxes were about the same. The Austin Community College taxes were the same. The difference was that the taxes of the Municipal Utility District (entity formed by developers to provide utility services in unincorporated areas normally provided by cities) were higher than the City of Austin taxes. So for the same level of services, I pay more in taxes to the MUD than I would have to the city of Austin -- actually I get fewer services because the MUD has no libraries or "social programs" as Austin has.The reason that people are being priced out of their homes in Austin is because it is such a desirable place to live that property values are going up rapidly -- my house in Austin has appreciated by a factor of four since I bought it in 1996. Perhaps all those improvements the people of Austin voted for did contribute to the problem because they help to make it such a desirable place to live.

Bingo. And this level of ignorance is even more well defined in the people fleeing high cost states to enjoy lower cost Texas. They will complain about their state, taking no culpability in causing it by voting for decades of mismanagement, and then come here to Texas. Of course, since they do not recognize why their original state is a mess, they continue to advocate for the same crap here, especially in Austin.

More bars, more restaurants, and more dry cleaners makes my point. Bars are negative. Eating in restaurants is negative. And forget dry cleaners! Bars are a disaster as alcohol is now seen as the greatest killer in America. Restaurants are part of the health and obesity epidemic. And dry cleaning should be illegal. Not only are the chemicals used bad for the environment but imagine the transportation required for people to run back and forth to get their laundry. A city is nothing more than a cancer whi

If you've fallen in love with the Walt Disney World experience, you now have the option to live in a town designed by Disney itself: Celebration, Florida. Resembling "Main Street, USA" and the "EPCOT World Showcase" writ large, Celebration helps blur the distinction between between Disney and real life, effectively letting you live in a theme park.

Know who doesn't live in Celebration, Florida and its mean income over $75k/yr? The people who work in Celebration, Florida.

The article only discusses domestic segregation, but the elephant in the room is national differences.

If global warming becomes as bad as they say, many heavily populated areas of the world (think India) will become too unproductive to support their population. Other areas (think Canada or Scandanavia) will become more habitable. Clearly the only humane policy will be totally open borders and to allow unlimited migration globally. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

1) if the population reduction is great (say 75% or more) and the need is urgent (say 50 years or less), then birth control can not possibly be adequate.

2) if birth control is inadequate or unattainable (you said it can not come to pass in your country) then what?

None of us want to advocate killing, but the next most drastic step after birth control (and maybe the next most drastic step after that) lead us to ethically taboo places that no one is willing to discuss.

The research shows a clear trend of the desirable cities becoming even more desirable, to the point where it's almost a necessity for city planners to lure college graduates or face decline.

I drew a different conclusion from this article. I know the article's focus was on attracting college graduates so that the city can prosper, but I instead considered the contrapositive: If a city is not prospering, then it has a lower-than-average percentage of college graduates. I see it as another confirmation of r [wikipedia.org]

At least here in Norway this trend probably started even earlier, but we have a significantly larger proportion of dual-income university-educated couples. (This trend is supported by our one-year parents leave with pay, where the parents have to share this time, and by public kindergartens when the children are a little older.)

I suspect that a strong driver for this big city concentration is the fact that most couples meet sometime during their university studies, and when this switched from being men getting their MSc's meeting the girls from the nursing schools, to being men & women at the same university, they would have really strong incentives to try to settle in a city with a big enough employer base that both would have multiple job alternatives.

I.e. my wife & I have lived in Oslo for almost 30 years now, we have always had lots of employment options, while my youngest brother and his wife live in a far smaller town:

In their area it has significantly harder to locate alternate (and interesting) employment when bad times hit the company one of them worked at.

It's not. Perhaps I should have made it clear which attitude I was referring to. I mean that we shouldn't (and I think it's bad) hate people who make something of themselves (or, more specifically, who make a lot of money), and that that attitude is not something you want in your area, or anywhere.

I wouldn't trust a human to decide. We need more research and let computers decide. My point is rampant "unfair" wages will eventually fix themselves with a crash.

It turns out when people get paid too much, their performance goes down. So that could be used as one indication. You're better off under-paying someone than over-paying. People are optimal when they get paid enough money to handle what life throws at them and spend time with their family. Too much more and their performance goes down. People sh

I have not seen any example of people being taught to hate the rich, nor have I seen anyone specifically bitching about people making something of themselves. Perhaps you do fear these ideas are being taught to the current generation, but if so, these fears are completely unfounded. In your position, I would re-examine the source of these fears and likely (going forward) disregard all information from these sources.

have you not been paying attention to san fransicso for example? slashing bus tires, attacking people who work for google for simply working for google, there is a real hate for those who are making something of themselves there. the same could be seen in NYC during the occupy movements.

Yeah I've seen that. And I'm sure that more of that is inevitable if the way our economy works doesn't change. The behavior your describing is the -effect- of relative income inequality (trickle down supply-side economic policy) growing wider over the last 35 years. And it's going to get worse, much worse, and it's going to cost "us" a lot more to ignore than if we actively alter course.

Emotion based outrage, increase in crime rates, riots, and eventually violent revolution are the -predictable- effects

Emotion based outrage, increase in crime rates, riots, and eventually violent revolution are the -predictable- effects of growing relative income inequality and loss of social mobility. And, as in the past, the powerful and elite are digging in their heels -which actually makes the situation worse.

I'm not denying that resentment (acrimony, hatred, w/e) exists. I'm denying that it's a generational/cultural phenomenon, or initiated by a propaganda campaign.

People are realizing that the construction job that paid $20/hr 30 years ago STILL pays $20/hr. And the "justifications" given for the situation aren't believed --people seeing our economic system as intentionally rigged, and they're not happy with that realization.

The real problem is that wealth makes people act like spoiled children and having a bunch of spoiled children move into your town is the shits. Rich people feel more entitled, have less empathy, are less generous and often are just arseholes. There have been numerous studies to back this up as well and the more the spread between the wealthy and the poor grows, the worse things will become. Perhaps it'll lead to successful revolts or perhaps it'll be like the peasant revolts that started in the 14th century

sorry if i dont understand, but a man buying a home, and wanting to live in it *THE HORROR!!!* rather than rent it out, goes out of his way to pay double what is allowed by law, and gives them a full year instead of 3 months as required by law.... and this man is being attacked by the people of san fran. The only thing he did was buy a house, legally, and want to live it it, legally.

the only people I see acting like spoiled brats are those who find an issue with the statement i just made, AKA people from

So if you could remake the world you would be a serf? Because under feudalism that's your only choice, and it doesn't matter how smart you are or how hard you work, your circumstance will NEVER improve.

If you're under the delusion that YOU would fare differently because you're (ahem) *special*, realize that what enables that delusion is the democracy and equality GIVEN to you by previous generations of socially conscious activists.

There are only so many chairs at the top, and NONE of them have your name on

The amount of arable land in the world is fixed. Some people live on a thousand acres, some people live in a tenement building.

The amount of currency in the world is effectively fixed even in a fractional reserve system.

Concentrated wealth does not create jobs, distributed wealth does. If there is a demand for shoes (lots of people want and can afford shoes), there WILL be a shoe factory. If people cannot afford to buy new shoes every year then there will NOT be a shoe factory and no amount of tax cuts f

In America, the arable land is owned by less than 3% of the people. In Ethiopia, it is 80%. So Ethiopia should be richer, right?

Concentrated wealth does not create jobs, distributed wealth does.

America has 492 billionaires [wikipedia.org], while Ethiopia has none. So Ethiopia wins again.

If people cannot afford to buy new shoes every year then there will NOT be a shoe factory

Yet in America, where people buy plenty of shoes, there are almost no shoe factories. In Vietnam, where most people cannot afford to buy new shoes every year, there are plenty of shoe factories, more than any other country.

Rather than pushing others down, they pull others up by creating jobs and demand.

It takes two people to create a job: one to offer the position, and one to accept it. Otherwise, the job hasn't really been "created." Proponents of trickle-down theory usually seem to ignore this fact.

Meanwhile, those who offer the positions are greedy and are always trying to pay as little as they can get away with, so I wouldn't consider them to be any more virtuous than those who accept the positions.

It takes two people to create a job: one to offer the position, and one to accept it.

Unless they are the same person. Billions of people are self-employed. Employing yourself is by far the most common way to get rich. People that seek out, or create, opportunity tend to do much better than people that sit around and whine about nobody handing it to them.

those who offer the positions are greedy... I wouldn't consider them to be any more virtuous...

Indeed. This is why economic systems that harness greed (e.g. capitalism) are far better at generating prosperity than economic systems based on virtue (e.g. socialism).

With an economic model based on the exploitation of scarcity of resources...

Except that our economy is mostly NOT based on the exploitation of scare resources. Someone writing code is not "stealing" from anyone else. They are creating value from nothing. The raw materials (petroleum and metal ore) in an iPhone is worth about 5 cents. The main commodities that our economy needs (oil, coal, iron ore, silica sand) are not "scarce", and it is absurd to claim that poor people would be better off somehow if they were left in the ground.

They're not "stealing" in the sense of larceny, but they are "stealing" in the sense of infringement on various government-granted monopolies put in place by legislatures elected by the people. Here are the citations, as requested:

There is a natural, even understandable, aversion to newcomers who price the indigenous populace out of being able to afford to live in their ancestral homes. The jobs created in the service industry by the presence of higher wage earners will help a few shopkeepers, but not so much for the working poor.

Look at all these jobs we've created! means, more and more, subsistence level service industry jobs that will afford the children of these citizens a measurable disadvantage over the offspring of parents w

What the summary fails to point out, of course, is that the growth of all the extra facilities - bars, restaurants, dry cleaners etc. - also ensure the job market grows in non-graduate jobs too, so it's win-win for everyone that lives in the lucky city

Prices in cities are targeted at those high-earning college graduates. There may be greater need for bartenders, waitstaff, etc, but those low-wage workers can't afford to actually live in the city themselves, which necessitates long commutes, which eats up even more of their meager pay, which ensures that the lower class stays lower class.